Margarita, with a Straw: ‘The sexuality of the disabled excited me as a film-maker’

In London years ago, Shonali Bose was inspired to make a movie when her cousin, who has cerebral palsy, told her she wanted sex for her birthday. Now both women are back in town – at the film festival with the finished work

There is, on first glance, something almost absurdly inclusive about Margarita, with a Straw, director Shonali Bose’s Sundance-funded film about a young Indian woman with cerebral palsy who falls in love with a blind girl.

Yet this is a film so charming and breezily rendered that it never feels like an exercise in politically correct consciousness-raising. Its central romance develops naturally, and the film’s heroine, Laila (played by luminous, able-bodied actor Kalki Koechlin), grows in many ways, not just as a person with a disability. She crosses continents literally, from Delhi to New York and back, and emotionally, from a sheltered teenager living at home with her parents to a formidable, independent creature, happy to hit a bar by herself and request the cocktail of the title.

Bose is a motor-mouthed, fiercely energetic woman in her 40s. She was a commanding presence onstage in Toronto where the film first premiered, dressed in a flowing Indian frock accessorised with chic, western scarf, welcoming the audience with the warm aplomb of a hostess who knows she’s about to throw a great party.

Speaking on the eve of the film’s London premiere, Bose launches into a five-minute discourse, rich in digressions and asides. The film, she says, took its cues from her cousin, Malini Chib, who was born with cerebral palsy and wrote about it in her autobiography, One Little Finger. The cousins are just a year apart in age, so grew up together. Bose’s aunt was especially keen on the idea of the film. “She said: ‘What’s the point of having a film-maker in the family if you can’t get them to make a film about cerebral palsy?’ I said: ‘Yes, no, maybe,’ because there was nothing new or exciting cinematically about the idea about someone overcoming disability. I was like: ‘Been there, done that’ – much to the chagrin of my aunt.”

Her enthusiasm was ignited, though, when she went for a drink with Malini on a stopover visit to London. “She’s a much bigger drinker than me, even though she has to use a plastic cup with a lid and a straw. So I asked her what she wanted for her 40th birthday and she banged her fist on the table and said very clearly, because her cerebral palsy sometimes makes it hard to understand her speech: ‘I want to have sex!’ I made some facetious reply, like: ‘It’s not what it’s made out to be,’ or ‘We’ll get you a vibrator’. But it hit me that, over all these years, I’d never dealt with her sexuality, and that, in India, we haven’t dealt with the sexuality of the disabled, and that excited me as a film-maker.”

The writing process was delayed initially because Bose was working on the script for another film. Then her teenage son died suddenly in an accident and she stopped working for a while. She began writing Margarita on her son’s birthday in January 2011, and bereavement threads its way into the final work.

The Sundance Institute supplied five mentors who, says Bose, ripped the script to bits, “but in such a great way”. One suggested that a seduction scene should start in a bathroom while one character helps Laila go to the toilet. Bose switches from her usual, Indian-inflected accent to an American one: “Oh honey, you should start when they take her panties off.”

There was a six-week rehearsal in which Koechlin worked on the challenges of depicting Laila’s physicality, and co-star Sayani Gupta, who plays her blind lover, was taught meditation techniques by Bose to get her energy under control.

The shoot was rocky. “In New York, I had a nightmare,” Bose says. “It was the first time in 25 years of living in the US that I experienced racism, from members of my own crew. We just didn’t have a crew who believed in the film passionately, so they were always whining and complaining. The Indian shoot, on the other hand, was so supportive and loving. It felt like home even though in many ways America is my home turf.”

The film is scheduled for a February release in India – a country in which homosexuality is still illegal. Nevertheless, Bose is optimistic about the film’s chances with the censors; the studio is also reluctant to cut sex scenes. “I’m so confident about the Indian audiences accepting the film because it’s fast-moving and emotional,” she says. “It’s not an ‘arthouse’ film, which I could have made if I had done it in a different style, but then it would have found a smaller audience. We tested it on a lot of mainstream viewers – people who are not interested in disability or gay rights – and after 10 minutes they got drawn in.” Last week, there was a similar reaction at the film festival preview. And there was one person who particularly loved it: guest of honour on the red carpet Malini Chib, the film’s inspiration, who was back in London to hit the pubs with her cousin.